Page 13 of The Raven King(The Raven Cycle 4)
“A storage closet is not a bedroom,” Blue said. “For starters.”
“The past decades have been stressful for him,” Maura said.
“The past few centuries have been stressful for Gwenllian, and she’s out on the counter at least!”
From the toilet, Jimi said, “You can’t compare one person’s coping capacity to another, hon.”
Calla snorted.
“Is that why you guys are all in a bathtub?” Blue asked.
“Don’t be mean,” Maura replied. “We were trying to make contact with Persephone. And no, before you ask, it didn’t work. And while we’re on the topic of you doing things that are unwise, where exactly did you disappear to? Being suspended is not a vacation.”
Blue bristled. “I was not on vacation! Ronan dreamt up his inner child, or something, and we had to take her to his mother. While we were there, we saw the three women from that tapestry I told you about, and a tree that looked messed up, and Gansey could have died really easily and I would have been right there beside him!”
The women looked pitying, which maddened Blue further.
She said, “I want to warn him.”
There was silence.
She hadn’t known she was going to say it until it came out of her mouth, but it was out now. She filled the quiet. “I know you said before that it would only ruin someone’s life to know, and it wouldn’t save them. I get that. But this is different. We’re gonna find Glendower, and we’re gonna ask for Gansey’s life to be saved. So we need Gansey to stay alive until then. And that means he has to stop charging into danger!”
Her thin hope couldn’t bear more pity at that point, but luckily, that wasn’t what she got. The women all exchanged looks, considering. It was hard to tell if they were making decisions based upon ordinary means or psychic ones.
Then Maura shrugged. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Sure, okay,” Maura said. She glanced again at Calla for verification; Calla lifted her eyebrows. “Tell him.”
“Really?”
Blue must have expected them to push back harder, because when they didn’t, she felt like she’d had a chair snatched from under her. It was one thing to inform them that she was going to tell Gansey he was going to die. It was another thing to imagine telling him. There was no undoing it once it was done. Blue squeezed her eyes shut — be sensible, get yourself together — and opened them.
Mother looked at daughter. Daughter looked at mother. Maura said, “Blue.”
Blue allowed herself to deflate.
Jimi blew out the candle she was holding and set it beside the toilet. Then she put her arms around Blue’s hips and tugged her onto her lap, like she would have when Blue was small. Well, Blue was still small. When Blue was young. The toilet groaned beneath them.
“You’re going to collapse the toilet,” Blue said, but she let Jimi fold her arms around her and pull her into her ample bosom. She sighed shakily as Jimi rubbed her back and clucked to herself. Blue could not understand how this childish comfort was at once soothing and suffocating. She was both glad for it and wishing that she could be someplace with fewer threads tying her to every challenge or sadness in her life.
“Blue, you know it’s not a bad thing that you want to leave Henrietta, right?” her mother asked from the tub. This was so precisely what Blue had been thinking about that she couldn’t tell if her mother had brought it up because her mother was a good psychic or merely because she knew her well.
Blue shrugged against Jimi. “Pshaw.”
“It’s not always running away,” Jimi said, her voice deep and rumbling through her chest to Blue’s ear. “To leave.”
Calla added, “We’re not going to think you hate Fox Way.”
“I don’t hate Fox Way at all.”
Maura swatted Orla’s hand away; Orla was trying to braid Maura’s damp hair. “I know. Because we’re great. But the difference between a nice house and a nice prison is really small. We chose Fox Way. We made it, Calla and Persephone and I. But it’s only your origin story, not your final destination.”
This wisdom of Maura’s made Blue quite cross for some reason.
“Say something,” Orla said.
Blue didn’t quite know how to say it; she didn’t know quite what it was. “It … just feels like such a waste. Falling in love with all of them.” All of them really meant all of them: 300 Fox Way, the boys, Jesse Dittley. For a sensible person, Blue thought that maybe she had a problem with love. In a dangerous voice, she added, “Don’t say ‘it’s good life experience.’ Do not.”
“I’ve loved a lot of people,” Orla said. “I would say it’s good life experience. Anyway, I told you ages ago those guys were going to leave you behind.”
“Orla,” snapped Calla, as Blue’s next breath was a little uneven. “It confounds me, sometimes, to imagine what you must tell your poor clients on the phone.”
“Whatever,” said Orla.
Maura shot Orla a dark look over her shoulder, and then said, “I wasn’t going to say good life experience. I was going to say that leaving helps, sometimes. And it’s not always a forever good-bye. There’s leaving and coming back.”
Jimi rocked Blue. The toilet lid creaked.
“I don’t think I can go to any of the colleges I want,” Blue said. “The counselor doesn’t think so.”
“What do you want?” Maura asked. “Not out of college. Out of life.”
Blue swallowed the truth once, because she was ready to move from crisis and crying to solutions and stability. Then she said the truth slowly and carefully, so that it would be manageable. “What I always wanted. To see the world. To make it better.”
Maura also seemed to be choosing her words carefully. “And are you sure that college is the only way to do that?”
This was the sort of impossible answer Blue’s guidance counselor would give her after looking at her financial and academic situation. Yes, she was sure. How else could she change the world for the better, without finding out first how to do it? How could she get a job that would pay her to be in Haiti or India or Slovakia if she didn’t go to college?
Then she remembered that it was not her guidance counselor asking; it was her psychic mother.
“What do I do?” Blue asked cannily. “What have you guys seen me doing?”
“Traveling,” Maura replied. “Changing the world.”
“Trees in your eyes,” Calla added, more gently than usual. “Stars in your heart.”
“How?” Blue asked.
Maura sighed. “Gansey’s offered to help you, hasn’t he?”
It was a guess that didn’t require psychic ability, only a minimal grasp of Gansey’s personality. Blue angrily tried to get up; Jimi wouldn’t let her. “I’m not going to ride the Gansey charity train.”
“Don’t be like that,” Calla said.
“Like what?”
“Bitter.” Maura considered, and then added, “I just want you to look at your future as a world where anything is possible.”
Blue shot back, “Like Gansey not dying before April? Like me not killing my true love with a kiss? Any of those possibilities?”
Her mother was quiet for a long minute, during which Blue realized that she was longing naively for her mother to tell her that both of those predictions could be wrong and that Gansey would be all right. But finally, her mother simply replied, “There’s going to be life after he dies. You have to think about what you’re going to do after.”
Blue had been thinking about what she was going to do after, which was why she’d had a crisis in the first place. “I’m not going to kiss him, anyway, so that can’t be how he goes.”
“I don’t believe in the concept of true love,” Orla said. “It’s a construct of a monogamous society. We’re animals. We make love in the bushes.”
“Thanks for your contribution,” Calla said. “Let’s give Blue’s prediction a call and let it know.”
“Do you love him?” Maura
asked curiously.
“I’d rather not,” Blue replied.
“He has lots of negative qualities I can help you hone in on,” her mother offered.
“I’m already aware of them. Infinitely. It’s stupid, anyway. True love is a construct. Was Artemus your true love? Is Mr. Gray? Does that make the other one not true? Is there just one shot and then it’s over?”
This last question was asked with the most flippancy of any of them, but only because it was the one that hurt the most. If Blue was nowhere near ready to take on Gansey’s death, she was certainly nowhere near ready to take on the idea of him being dead long enough for her to happily waltz into a relationship with someone she had not even met yet. She just wanted to keep being best friends with Gansey forever, and maybe one day also have carnal knowledge of him. This seemed like a very sensible desire, and Blue, as someone who had sought to be sensible her entire life, was feeling pretty damn put out that this small thing was being denied her.
“Take my mom card,” Maura said. “Take my psychic card. I don’t know the answers to these questions. I wish I did.”
“Poor baby,” Jimi murmured into Blue’s hair. “Mmm, I’m so glad you never got any taller.”
“For crying out loud,” Blue said.
